Stop Confusing Commerce with Culture
Another round of debating with producers and marketers, now literally
By MARTIN REZNY
So I was going through my inbox the other day, trying to manage the plague of automatically generated messages and notifications of Biblical proportions that comes with the cursed fate of being a self-promoting artist on social media. Amidst the dozens upon dozens of generic blabs, one letter sticked out, on account of looking like an actual letter. But there was more to it.
I’m not entirely sure why, I certainly didn’t have the time, but I felt it required response. There was something about it, with its perfect format and stylistic polish, with its every sentence being maximally effective while simultaneously achieving flawless efficiency. I could tell there was an exceptional marketer behind it, and he claimed he really wanted to hear what I’m struggling with.
I accepted the challenge and… You can actually read the first round here.
If you don’t have the time, here’s what’s happened in a nutshell. I expressed my frustrations with some common marketing practices and drew some lines in the sand in terms of artistic integrity, showing how it limits my commercial viability. He retorted with a lot of very good points about how marketing doesn’t need to (and shouldn’t) be obnoxious, as long as it’s based on the target’s permission, and that success is now decided directly by the customers.
But our debate didn’t end there. It got a bit technical in the middle, and I’ll get to that later in this article in regards to the commercial viability of classical music. But eventually, I think it boils down to one specific clash of ideas. Not a very new one, either, though it sure seems to be enhanced by modern technology and industrial mindset. While one cannot argue against what sells, I still feel I have to argue against making culture increasingly about selling.
Here’s the conclusion to his argument, and the opening salvo for this article:
However, I know a few artists who “Give the market what it wants” because they’re amazingly intelligent and talented musicians and composers. The music they create makes them talented, the fact that they give the market what it wants so they can make enough to create the music they actually love makes them smart.
At best, they are able to give life to their projects because they have created cash flow and connections through their more commercial works to make it possible. They are also smart because they have figured out a way to make a living making music which is far better for most than a desk job where they would live Picasso’s “Dichotomy”.
At the end of they day, the movie/TV industry is made up of people who are all extremely impressionable about trends and “hipness” and being cool. If a marketer can create a reason for poetry or sophisticated classical music to be used then believe me, it will be used.
One Businessman’s Smartness or Another Artist’s Selling Out
I would like to begin with making it clear that the question hinted at in the title above is not a foregone conclusion, nor is it necessary for there to be a single correct answer at all. What I’d like to point out is that many business oriented people, as well as many artists, do believe that there’s only one truth (and that they’re the ones who have it), but that’s extremely unlikely.
If there isn’t a single correct theory in physics on the most fundamental level, there sure as hell isn’t going to be a single correct theory in social sciences. If you look at the example of quantum physics and the theory of general relativity, you will see two true theories that work on their respective scales, but don’t mix. I believe that commerce and culture are just as incompatible.
Which is to say, not entirely, but mostly. It’s fair to say that in order to make a living by making any kind of art, said art has to be in some sense promoted so that prospective customers or sponsors know about its existence. It follows that art for sale also cannot be completely unappealing to any kind of audience, as much as it cannot be too expensive to be made and distributed.
But let’s leave the spin zone for a second and call things by their true names. You can say that it’s smart to find a way to make a genre of high art sellable because it takes certain kind of intelligence, but the number one most common way of making high art more “appealing” is dumbing it down. Commercially sound decisions often are culturally vandalous. A compromise between the two only works insofar as the audiences want good works of art.
Who the Hell Are You to Decide What Art Is Good or Bad
It’s absolutely not up to me to decide whether any particular work of art is good or bad, not personally at least, just as it isn’t up to the audiences and their opinion. This especially is a fundamental clash between commerce and culture. In commerce, customer is always right. If commerce had anything like commandments or axioms, that would absolutely be one of them. In culture, however, participants at culture aren’t customers, or consumers.
It may sound weird in these postmodern relativistic days, but it really is quite simple. Stop me when I say anything that’s too difficult to understand or is questionable. People can like good stuff. People can also like bad stuff. Right? Therefore, goodness or badness of stuff is not determined by what people like. That, my friends, is the novel concept of taste. Taste is the ability to appreciate the wit, craft, or complexity required to produce a particular work of art.
I’ve already written a lot about how art is objective and why timeless classics exist, so I won’t dwell on it too much now. Suffice it to say that commerce worships the customer and it cares not one bit about his (or her) level of taste. In a world where artists are forced to sell or die at an ever faster rate, a downward spiral of taste annihilation is the logical outcome, and the quality of the culture comes down the drain with it. Very soon, bad is the new good.
Example: Increasing “Commercial Viability” of Classical Music
It’s not like the new art industries are not aware of the conflict. On the Top Rejection Reasons page for AudioJungle platform (for selling soundtrack music), they have an “Art vs Commerce” section where they say:
This is a stock audio library and while there is a place for art, there are also specific needs customers have: to find particular types of tracks that match with their specific project.
Sounds reasonable right? It does, on the surface, until you delve deeper into what’s expected to fit the “needs of the market” and the assumed project requirements. To sum it up quickly, the musical piece will not be accepted if it has too much of an intro, too much of musical development, or too much of virtuosic instrumental work. But at least it can has an ending and it cannot literally be a few notes repeating, though repeating is the name of the game.
If you understand music, you should notice that there’s very little music left in there. Before you start blaming me for not understanding how soundtracks work, let me add that I do realize that somebody still makes good soundtracks somewhere — this is an extreme example of the overall trend, and allow me to give you two kinds of context, musical and historical, of soundtrack making.
Musically, the above rules are a recipe for one thing, a bad soundtrack that only a musically tasteless person would want to use in their project. After the application of any minimal sense of taste for classical music, the only emotion stirred by pieces of sound that generic can be being bored to death within the space of ten seconds. In good soundtracks, the only hard rule is to achieve interesting developments quickly and compartmentalize the whole into divisible parts. The rest requires a trained listener to determine, not a drone.
Just try searching for any cinematic feel/genre on AudioJungle and listen to top three finds. I tried it a few days ago with a friend of mine who’s a classically trained pianist, just to make sure that I’m not imagining things.
For example, all three first results for “epic” music sounded almost exactly alike, because apparently, “epic” music only comes in what sounded like the same few chords, same 4/4 time signature, same-ish tempo (110–137), and only two measures worth of unique tonal progressions that don’t deserve to be called a theme. It shouldn’t be surprising that the musical formula for pop music is currently so narrow that it is not uncommon for multiple composers to sue each other over exactly the same pieces of music arrived at by chance.
And now, historical context. All this quantitative BS that has become the law of the land has exactly nothing to do with how music intended for musical accompaniment has been made in the ages before the mechanization of music. As long as the live players of instruments and whole orchestras of them were the only source of new music, the process of creation was very different. Namely, the composer would imagine or view a specific script/play/footage to be accompanied and would make a soundtrack to it. Pretty straightforward.
It wasn’t technically possible and wouldn’t make commercial sense to make generic soundtracks to accompany nothing in particular, based purely on genre conventions so that anonymous anyones can simply download them and easily re-edit them. Also, it wasn’t possible to just use a mathematical formula and press space bar to churn out a workable piece of music. However, since the new technology still allows the actual soundtracks to be made, and better, it is our failure.
Take Your Original Works of Art and… Enjoy Them Privately
That’s what the good people at AudioJungle suggest in the instructional video on the above linked webpage — you can still compose superartistic fantastic whatever you want, for your personal projects. Just don’t expect to sell it. Nobody is forbidding you, it’s not censorship, it’s just democracy in the market. Which is ultimately why it doesn’t matter if one’s rejected by a gatekeeper, or the audience directly, since the gatekeeper serves the audience.
Now, let me tell you something about my homeland, a very European place in terms of art and culture, in the way in which an American would say that something is “so European”. During the communist era in my country, almost the whole second half of the 20th century, there was actual censorship. If you were an aspiring artist, you could be denied a job in culture, an ability to make a living by making art, if you rejected the dominant ideology based on the will of the majority of the population, with shame and stigma attached.
Thankfully, afterwards came the capitalism. Under which there are next to no jobs for aspiring artists to the extent to which the culture is commercialized because it is the will of the majority that most kinds of high culture are not entertaining enough to deserve a financial reward. Artists who refuse to adopt the current trends are therefore denied a job in culture, an ability to make a living by making art, with all the shame and stigma attached of being broke.
The only difference, in effect, is actually that under communism, more of better art was produced because production of good art was the priority of the government that had a near monopoly over the funding of culture. Since we have started adapting the American model of consumable commercial culture, it only took about a decade to fatally wound almost all of high brow artistic endeavors. Why? Czech market is small, subcultures are not profitable.
And that’s that, I guess. Said, not writing in his native language because what would be the point of that these days. Doesn’t the end result matter to the commerce people? What’s the difference between a censorship and a system that has the same end result? Maybe nobody has the right to be given a platform, but maybe it should not be made systemically nearly impossible to be an actual artist making actual art. Exceptions exist, but the trend is clear.
The Europeans Strike Back (We Wish)
It maybe sounds like a cliche, but the problem really lies in the nature of the system. Commercialism is not based on laws of nature or a divine revelation, some sort of absolute truth. The truth is, it’s arbitrary, we made it up. We can also unmake it, or change it in any way. It has substantial objective elements, like the science of economy, but the utilitarianism behind it as a doctrine (maximum satisfaction of the preferences of most people) is pure ideology.
Culture, as such, is not about selling at all. It doesn’t exist to maximize profit, not even to satisfy anyone. It’s about figuring out and expressing individual human identity, and it is about social learning. It’s true that in a commercial system, audiences may decide they want good culture, but good culture is hard. Hard to make, which is at odds with economic priniciples, as well as hard to learn, which makes it an elite enterprise, not a democractic one.
Culture is supposed to make people aspire to become better, not to congratulate them for mediocrity, it’s supposed to attack the flaws of the current social order, not to help it get entrenched in them. It’s all this big picture stuff that people of commerce have no time for that matters. Every time anyone dumbs down a work of art to sell it, it devalues the culture and erodes the taste of the audience, which requires more dumbing down, etc.
Ultimately, this European perspective is not that commerce doesn’t matter, it’s the realization that commerce is not really culture, and that commerce and culture are not bedfellows, but enemies. Giving the market what it wants may be smart, but it is sad, not a thing an artist should celebrate, it’s something to be avoided if at all possible. One may make a living that way, better than none or a terrible one, but again, it’s a compromise that typically comes at a cost to the art. One may manage to pay for actual art being made from money made that way, but should one really be required to? Because the system requires it.
In the end, I don’t resent marketers, or businessmen. There have to be limits to artistic flights of fancy — no free lunches, no unlimited budgets. There cannot be an audience or a grant for everyone. Adversity can even stimulate artists to greater accomplishments. But the world today has changed since the days of old, or in my country, a past so recent I still lived it in community theaters and at poetry festivals. The commerce is winning, the balance is lost, and with it, some of the greatest forms of art face extinction, in essence, if not in name.
I apologize for the interminability of this article, but I really had a lot to say.
I welcome any counterarguments.
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